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In technical preview since December 2018, System Center 2019 (all products except ConfigMgr) is ready to release this month, March 2019. The suite of products comes with some significant and some minor enhancements, but the primary focus is to better enable a hybrid cloud approach. Many of the normal processes will be offloading to Azure to help organizations get further along in the direction Microsoft wants its customers to take.

However, most important to customers is that the company is eliminating the Semi-Annual Channel (SAC) for System Center 2019. The product suite will retain the Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) and what it calls an Update Rollout (UR) “train” (not “ring”). According to Microsoft, the majority of customers utilizing LTSC for System Center 2019 and in a few rare cases use SAC. So, the company is streamlining the process. Customers can use LTSC – which provides five years of mainstream support and five years of extended support – and then Microsoft will deliver the incremental fixes and updates through the UR train.

So, bottom line: There will not be Semi-Annual Channel releases, but new features before the next Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release will be delivered through Update Rollups.